Definition
In old English law, the act of receiving and harboring a felon with knowledge of that person's criminal status. The term derives from the Law French of medieval English legal practice and corresponds to what modern law would recognize as accessory after the fact or, in some formulations, harboring a fugitive. The knowing element was central: passive receipt of a felon was distinguished from unwitting shelter, and liability attached only where the harborer acted with scienter — that is, with actual knowledge of the felony.
Common Confusion
RECETTEMENT should not be conflated with mere presence near a felon or with complicity in the underlying crime itself. The concept addresses post-felony conduct only — the shielding of someone already guilty of a felony — and is distinct from abetting, counseling, or procuring the commission of that felony in the first place. Modern readers may also conflate this with the separate notion of compounding a felony (agreeing not to prosecute in exchange for consideration), which is a different offense with different elements.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval and early modern English legal sources written in Law French, the formal legal tongue of English courts from the Norman Conquest through the seventeenth century. Researchers encountering it in primary sources — plea rolls, year books, and early treatises — should understand that it represents a distinct procedural and substantive category within the old common law of accessories, not a term of art carried forward into modern English legal vocabulary.
The knowing-receipt doctrine encoded in recettement survived the death of the term itself, migrating first into the common law offense of accessory after the fact and later, in American jurisdictions, into statutory harboring and obstruction offenses. A researcher tracing the historical development of accessory liability will find recettement occupying an important early position in that lineage, but must be alert to the fact that the medieval concept did not map precisely onto later categorical distinctions between accessories before and after the fact.
The phrase preserved in Britton — del consentment ou del recettement de ceux felons à escient — is particularly instructive because it pairs recettement with consentment, suggesting that early English law grouped knowing harboring alongside knowing consent as forms of culpable association with felony. This pairing has implications for understanding how complicity doctrine was conceived before the common law fully articulated the before/after distinction.
Researchers should also note that Britton, the thirteenth-century treatise from which the quoted passage derives, was composed as a royal pronouncement rather than a practitioner's manual, and its formulations may reflect idealized doctrine rather than uniform practice.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary provides the sole substantial entry among standard Anglo-American legal dictionaries. Burrill correctly identifies the term as Law French, correctly glosses it as receiptment and harboring, and correctly flags the scienter requirement (à escient — knowingly). The citation to Britton chapter 1 is the natural primary source anchor, and Burrill's treatment, though brief, is accurate as far as it goes.
What Burrill does not address is the relationship between recettement and the broader taxonomy of medieval accessory liability, nor does it trace the doctrinal evolution from this term into later English and American law. Researchers who rely on Burrill alone will have an accurate but incomplete picture. No entry appears in Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, or Black's Law Dictionary, reflecting the term's complete obsolescence by the time those works were compiled.
Jurisdictional Note
Recettement is a term of English law exclusively. It has no parallel in continental civil law traditions, and no American jurisdiction has ever employed the term as a term of art. Its significance is entirely historical, relevant to research in medieval English law and the early development of accessory doctrine in common law jurisdictions.